This page was last built on 12.12.20 01:35:09

Estimated time of infection vs. confirmed infections

Following the ideas from Tomas Pueyo's Medium post "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" [1], we assume the average time from infection to death at 23 days [2]. The data is pulled from the COVID-19 Data Repository by Johns Hopkins CSSE [3] every hour. Countries with a minimnum of 1000 confirmed cases and 40 confirmed deaths are included in this analysis.

The time from infection to death is equal to the incubation period plus the time from symptoms to death. This is used to estimate the time of the infections that lead to the observed deaths. We take the last fatality rate per country (total_cases/total_deaths) to estimate the number of infections that are responsible for the observed deaths.

In the figures below, you can observe successive waves of infections (dashed), detections (black) and deaths (red) for each country. The upper panel shows the absolute number of events. The dashed lines show the estimated number of infections. The lower panel shows the normalized number of events. Here the temporal delay between the waves and the relative change between each other can be observed.

[1] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

[2] https://github.com/midas-network/COVID-19/tree/master/parameter_estimates/2019_novel_coronavirus

[3] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series

US
Brazil
India
Mexico
United Kingdom
Italy
France
Iran
Spain
Russia
Argentina
Colombia
Peru
South Africa
Poland
Germany
Indonesia
Belgium
Chile
Turkey
Ukraine
Ecuador
Canada
Romania
Iraq
Netherlands
Czechia
Bolivia
Philippines
Pakistan
Sweden
Bangladesh
Egypt
Morocco
Hungary
Saudi Arabia
Switzerland
Bulgaria
Portugal
China
Guatemala
Austria
Tunisia
Greece
Panama
Jordan
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Honduras
Israel
Algeria
Kazakhstan
Moldova
Croatia
Armenia
Japan
Dominican Republic
Burma
Serbia
Ireland
North Macedonia
Slovenia
Afghanistan
Paraguay
Costa Rica
Azerbaijan
Ethiopia
Nepal
Georgia
Kenya
Kyrgyzstan
Oman
Sudan
Libya
Belarus
Nigeria
El Salvador
Lebanon
Kosovo
Slovakia
Albania
Venezuela
Denmark
Kuwait
West Bank and Gaza
Australia
Lithuania
Uzbekistan
United Arab Emirates
South Korea
Montenegro
Cameroon
Finland
Malaysia
Luxembourg
Norway
Zambia
Angola
Congo (Kinshasa)
Bahrain
Senegal
Ghana
Zimbabwe
Latvia
Jamaica
Madagascar
Qatar
Uganda
Mauritania
Malta
Namibia
Sri Lanka
Estonia
Mozambique
Cote d'Ivoire
Cabo Verde

Ahead of the curve

Some countries start testing the population earlier in the outbreak than others. The time delay between the wave of deaths and the wave of confirmed cases is indicative for how early a country is detecting new cases ahead of the increase of deaths. Earlier detection means a better chances for successful isolation of an infected person and treatment of the desease.

We measure the distance of the maximum of cumulative deaths and new deaths to the number of infections to estimate the progression of the infection across countries.

If, in the early phase of the infection wave, the number of deaths rises faster than the number of confirmed cases, the distance drops, indicating that

A comparison of countries with respect to their mean time for reponse is presented below.

To determine the above values, we plot the number of confirmed cases (solid black lines) and the number of deaths (dashed black lines). From this, we measure the distance of the day of maximum deaths (dashed red lines) to the day of confirmed cases at this y-value.

The distance is indicative for how fast the humber of confirmed cases increases comapred to the increase of the number of deaths.

US
Brazil
India
Mexico
United Kingdom
Italy
France
Iran
Spain
Russia
Argentina
Colombia
Peru
South Africa
Poland
Germany
Indonesia
Belgium
Chile
Turkey
Ukraine
Ecuador
Canada
Romania
Iraq
Netherlands
Czechia
Bolivia
Philippines
Pakistan
Sweden
Bangladesh
Egypt
Morocco
Hungary
Saudi Arabia
Switzerland
Bulgaria
Portugal
China
Guatemala
Austria
Tunisia
Greece
Panama
Jordan
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Honduras
Israel
Algeria
Kazakhstan
Moldova
Croatia
Armenia
Japan
Dominican Republic
Burma
Serbia
Ireland
North Macedonia
Slovenia
Afghanistan
Paraguay
Costa Rica
Azerbaijan
Ethiopia
Nepal
Georgia
Kenya
Kyrgyzstan
Oman
Sudan
Libya
Belarus
Nigeria
El Salvador
Lebanon
Kosovo
Slovakia
Albania
Venezuela
Denmark
Kuwait
West Bank and Gaza
Australia
Lithuania
Uzbekistan
United Arab Emirates
South Korea
Montenegro
Cameroon
Finland
Malaysia
Luxembourg
Norway
Zambia
Angola
Congo (Kinshasa)
Bahrain
Senegal
Ghana
Zimbabwe
Latvia
Jamaica
Madagascar
Qatar
Uganda
Mauritania
Malta
Namibia
Sri Lanka
Estonia
Mozambique
Cote d'Ivoire
Cabo Verde